(Only after all these years, do I realise that it’s possible Magic Knight’s David Jones may be the same David Jones of Lemmings/GTA/Crackdown fame. Anyone confirm or deny? Because that’d be awesome. I suspect it’s not, but still…)

That’s a bit much, Adam. It’s not like the difference between 2000 and XP is even as great as, say, XP and Vista.

The one that really got me was C&C: The First Decade, in which the updated C&C and Red Alert required XP but the other, later games worked fine on 2K. Still, everything else about the bundle smacked of typical EA laziness, so why not fuck off the 2K users as well, eh.

*now has XP and was able to play Company of Heroes, thank you very much*

Sadly no, it’s not the same David Jones. I remember reading in Retrogamer a few months back that after Stormbringer, he he largely vanished from the games industry, but works in some other field of computing.

If somebody tried running a current title on a 486, we’d tell them that they need a current processor to run the game. If somebody tried running a current title with a Voodoo graphics accelerator, we’d tell them you need a current graphics card.

So why is it any different someone trying to run a title on an unsupported OS?

I’m not necessarily saying developers/publishers shouldn’t support Win2k, but I am saying that they don’t claim to support it, either.

“So why is it any different someone trying to run a title on an unsupported OS?”

Because the games I mentioned in the article all run fine under Windows 2000. From the perspective of a typical DirectX 9 app, the two systems are identical. It’s not the same situation as trying to run games on below-spec hardware. At all.

The point of the article wasn’t to demand that developers and publishers support a now commercially insignificant OS, just to politely ask that they don’t act like jerks to the few people who do still use Win2k (claiming their games are fundamentally incompatible when there are just minor API glitches, OS checks in installers, etc.).